Anthropic showed Claude Duet — a separate agent that does not sit in a chat but writes what it needs from you. In the morning it sends a brief, by day it pulls tasks, at night it stays quiet. Opus 5.5 is underneath. For now it is a research preview for Claude Pro and Max in the US; Team and Enterprise plans are out.
How this is not ordinary Claude
The regular app waits for you to open a thread. Duet comes to you: “five things in motion, two will not move without you”. Memory, skills and connectors are the same; history is one feed. The company promises more than 6,000 connectors and plugins. Large jobs — an opening checklist, a deck for a meeting, a dashboard from the till and the CRM — the agent builds on a cloud machine and hands back for review.
Before mail, a login or a payment Duet has to ask. The action log is open. Anthropic writes separately that the preview can misjudge urgency and miss a message between check-ins.
Where and for how much
A separate app on iOS and Android; on a computer, claude.ai. Limits are shared with the rest of Claude: background checks eat quota too, a big deck even more. Team and Enterprise are “not yet”. This is not a button in a corporate tenancy.
How to look at it
Treat it as a signal of where Anthropic is taking the product: not a chat, a duty officer. Do not treat it as a Slack-assistant replacement for a European firm — geography and plan cut the door. Watch whether the brief mixes urgent with noisy and how many background turns a morning digest costs, not the slogan “get back to what needs you”.
